The Invisible Boy (G)
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Caution: spoilers!

This came out in 1957, but I don't think I had ever heard of it until 2016, when I got the 1956 movie Forbidden Planet on a 2-DVD set that also included this movie. And the reason this is included with that is because of Robby the Robot, who made his first appearance in that movie, and his second in this one. (Over the years, he would appear in several other movies and TV shows.) Anyway, before I watched this, I wasn't sure whether I would end up putting my review in the science fiction category or in B-movies. A ways into the movie, I started thinking I might put it in the comedy section, instead. But ultimately I couldn't do that, because there's some serious stuff going on. It gets kind of dark, so for awhile I also considered possibly categorizing it in the scary movies section. Still, there's definitely a lot of LOL stuff in the movie. Some of the humor must have been intentional, but... I'm not sure all of it was. I mean, the parts that I found the most hilarious were scenes in which various characters should have found things that happened startling, or even frightening. But they just took those things in stride. Maybe that was meant to be funny, but I think I must have found it funnier than it was meant to be. And in the end... I decided B-movies is the best category for it.

Anyway, there's a scientist named Dr. Tom Merrinoe, who had created a supercomputer which apparently the military often consult for various purposes. (And the computer can talk, or rather, according to a needlessly complicated explanation by Tom, it mimics human speech.) At the start of the movie, they're preparing for the launch of an important, top secret experimental rocket. The computer tells them that their calculations for the necessary fuel were off by a sizable percentage, which is rather shocking. (I had an idea of the reason for that, and I'm pretty sure I turned out to be right, though no one in the movie ever commented on it later.) Meanwhile, Tom has a wife named Mary and a ten-year-old son named Timmie, and he seems very disappointed that Timmie has no aptitude for mathematics, and can't even play chess. (Seriously, though, the guy is ridiculously obsessed with math, and when Timmie asks him what a computer is, his explanation obviously goes on way longer than it should; he seems to have no idea how boring he is. But this being the 1950s, you can't really expect his wife or son to come out and tell him. Though Timmie does give him an unsubtle hint, which Tom still doesn't seem to get.) Anyway, one day he takes Timmie to his office and leaves him alone in the room where the computer is, with the expectation that the computer will teach him to play chess. Which it does, by hypnotizing Timmie (which I'm pretty sure Tom wasn't expecting, and would have been disturbed by if he knew about it.) And apparently the computer also greatly increased Timmie's general intelligence, though I'm not sure Timmie himself even noticed that. He takes his own new abilities as much in stride as anyone takes anything, in this movie.

Later on, at home, Tom plays chess with Timmie, and his son lets him win the first match, but then he asks for another game. His father is impressed with how much he's improved (thinking TImmie was almost as good as him), so he agrees. In fact, he promises to give Timmie whatever he wants if he can beat him. And Timmie then beats him in six moves. He asks about Robby, which surprises Tom, because he's sure he had never told his wife or son about Robby. Tom explains that there was a scientist, now retired, who had apparently gone a little crazy, and claimed to have made a time machine and brought something back from three centuries in the future. And that something was Robby the Robot (presumably the same character as in "Forbidden Planet," though the robot's subsequent roles, as far as I know, are not meant to be the same character). Tom and some of the scientists he works with had jokingly tinkered with the robot, but could never figure out how to get it to work. But Timmie wants to see it, and because he'd beaten his father at chess, Tom took him to see it. It was in an old lab room within the building where he works, which no one uses anymore. And of course, once again he leaves his son unsupervised. And of course, Timmie gets Robby working. And somehow, this doesn't surprise or even particularly interest anyone, when they find out.

Anyway, Timmie takes Robby home to play with him. And he asks Robby to build him a better (and bigger) kite than the cheap broken one he had. So Robby makes a bigger, better kite (in fact, "kite" is probably too simple a word for what he builds). It would be strong enough to carry Timmie into the air, which the boy wants to do, but Robby won't let him, because it's too dangerous, and his prime directive is not to harm rational beings. So Timmie takes Robby back to his father's workplace, and gets the computer to "fix" the robot so that it would let him do stuff he wanted to do. Unbeknownst to Timmie, the change the computer makes in Robby goes beyond just removing his prime directive; the computer becomes Robby's new master. (Let's not forget, if this is the same robot from the other movie, then it was built 300 years in the future by a genius whose own intellect had been vastly enhanced by alien technology far beyond anything humans had... 300 years in the future. And meanwhile, a 1950s human from Earth somehow built a computer that was more advanced than Robby. Because why not?) Anyway, Robby now lets Timmie fly on the kite, which naturally upsets his mother when she finds out about it. So after Timmie lands, she smashes the kite's radio control unit and scolds Timmie. This leads Timmie to later tell Robby he wishes his parents didn't always see him doing stuff like that, which naturally inspires Robby to make a serum for Timmie to drink that would make him temporarily invisible. And when his parents find out about that, they're at least a little concerned. But, you know, they don't freak the fuck out, as they probably should.

Well, Timmie uses his invisibility to play some pranks, but when his father manages to catch him and spank him, he decides to run away. Naturally, they don't discover he's missing for some time, because they weren't expecting to see him, anyway. However, it's at this point that the movie takes a dark turn. The computer asks Tom where his son is, which is how he comes to learn of Timmie's disappearance. The computer wants Tom to give it a code that only he knows, which I guess is the only thing that would prevent the whole system from self-destructing if it was moved. And the computer wants to move. And it tells Tom if he doesn't provide the code within a certain amount of time, Timmie will be killed slowly and painfully. Of course, this is a matter of national security, so Tom calls in the military and others to tell them what's happened. They all assume the computer is being controlled by either a foreign power or maybe by aliens. But after quite awhile, Tom finally figures out that the computer itself has become sentient. And that it has gotten Robby to implant microchips in several people's brains, allowing it to control them. And... well, its plan gets exponentially more dire, from there. Of course, Timmie remains blissfully ignorant of all of this.

I fear I've said way too much, but I feel like this is one of those movies where it's practically impossible to explain anything about the plot without giving away almost everything. Still, I'm leaving out several dramatic scenes leading up to the climax, and I won't tell you how it all ends. But the movie turned out to be a lot more fun than I expected it to be. So much so that I wasn't sure how to rate it. I could almost give it one heart, or at least four smileys. But... I only gave "Forbidden Planet" three smileys, and I feel like rating this higher than that would kind of be sacrilege. In some ways I'm sure I did enjoy this movie more than that one, but... the actual quality of the earlier movie was considerably better, and it was way more iconic than this. (Which isn't hard, considering I'd never heard of this before. But still.)